The New Fashion Rules: Inthefrow. Victoria Magrath

Who decides what we wear, how we dress and the way we define ourselves through clothing? Is it us? Do we decide our own take on style and self-branding? Or is it our audience, the passer-by in the street, the person in front of us in the coffee queue or our latest follower on Instagram? The rules of the fashion game have changed, and we are all having to learn the new tips, tricks and rules to play it successfully.

We live in a world where the majority dress to fit in with societal norms, and our clothing can offer an insight into our status, character, interests and our sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not. As humans, we have always loved to fit into a group to feel a sense of belonging, but the recent evolution of the Internet has had the most dramatic effect on the way we dress today. It has transformed the way fashion is worn, consumed, sold and produced. The majority of us no longer buy clothing for our own personal enjoyment alone, but for the admiration of those who observe or follow us.

Online fashion retailing has fascinated me since it was kicked up a notch in the early 2000s. I studied for my fashion retail degree at the University of Manchester in 2007 and although online shopping was rising in popularity, lots of people were still dubious that it would ever stick. I was sitting in a branding lecture while my lecturer scoffed at the idea that people would ever risk buying such tactile items on their computer. She believed that buying clothing online would never take off, but I was already seeing a trend: brands were increasingly developing online stores and I knew it was only a matter of time before more people tried it out for themselves.

Before I had finished my degree, mobile-retailing was already a realistic proposition and within a small space of time, the thought of shopping on my mobile became somewhat normal. Retailers not only had an online store to sell their products globally, but they could now promote and sell them from every mobile phone in the world. The question at that point was how exactly could a brand entice people to buy from their mobile app, and what could they do to enhance their customers’ enjoyment and experience? I was intrigued, so I started a three-year PhD to answer that very question.

My thesis investigated the purchasing decisions, behaviours and emotions of the fashion consumer shopping on mobile apps. After three fun and interesting years, I graduated, added ‘Dr’ to my title and found out that mobile retailing would actually be far more lucrative and essential for retailers than we had initially expected (among a lot of other things, of course, but we don’t have all day). But my findings were borne out over the following eight years, backed up by stats published in 2017, stating that 58 per cent of ASOS’s sales came from mobile purchases, and 70 per cent of their web traffic came via mobile. I’m guessing their mobile site was pretty great … they must have read my PhD. *I’m joking.*

(@inthefrow)

(@cgstreetstyle)

But let’s get back to today, when online retailing is global and no longer solely dependent on the elite who have money to spend. Fashion and style inspiration are no longer being dictated by top models and society’s richest from their ivory towers – the latest trends are promoted by ordinary people from their bedrooms. New York blogger and photographer Scott Schuman was one of the first on the scene, documenting the outfits of ordinary people on the streets. His website, The Sartorialist, was the birth of what would soon become a wide-spread appetite for street-style imagery, and it acted as a catalyst for a new wave of street-style photographers, hungry for well-dressed folk. Now, fashion week shows are swarming with photographers falling over each other to get a snap of the best-dressed attendee – something that not everyone is happy about, but we’ll get to that later in the book. The Internet has democratised fashion, so that it’s starting to be led by the more relatable girl- or boy-next-door. They take selfies, write blogs and vlog to camera – and while the relationship between fashion and the world’s wealthiest people still exists, a broader range of social influencers are flooding the fashion scene.

After my PhD, I took up a lecturing position at the University of Manchester. But, armed with fresh information about a vastly growing industry, I wanted to write it all down, so I started a fashion, beauty and travel blog. Inthefrow – an abbreviation of in the front row – was the name of my bubble, where I offered my readers a portal to the latest clothing I loved, beauty products worth our money and trends to hit the catwalk. I wanted to create ‘the digital front row’ for a new generation of fashion-hungry readers. At that stage in my career

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